Oliver's Island

It was definitely an exciting week here at DonorsChoose: we were featured in The Wall Street Journal and Investor's Business Daily.

The WSJ article got amazingly prominent placement in the print edition: it was above-the-fold on the front page of the Marketplace section!

My friend Jordan's new high-end Q Tonic water endeavour is featured in the New York Times today! Very exciting stuff.

Jordan brought his tonic to our shared Thanksgiving this past week and it was a huge hit!

Maya and I spent the first few days of this week in Montreal. It was great! One of us will do a separate blog post with photos, restaurant recommendations, etc.

But for now I wanted to announce that in my (albeit limited) experience, Montreal has the best grafitti of any city I've ever visited! It was everywhere and the quality was amazing!!

So you can see for yourself, I've uploaded the many photos of Montreal grafitti that I took. Enjoy....

Now this is very well done.

My man Ely is one of the illest software engineers in the Wild Wild West. We worked together at EQuill and he proved himself a straight-up software black belt!

He worked at Macromedia before working with us at EQuill and went back to Macromedia (now Adobe) when EQuill went north towards Microsoft-land. But I just came across his blog and his About bio made me smile:

This site is maintained by Ely Greenfield. First and foremost described as father, husband, and friend, if you’re at this site you’re more likely interested in his work as a developer. Ely has been a developer at Macromedia / now Adobe for over 10 years, with an extended vacation in the middle working for the best little startup you probably never heard of, E-Quill.

That's what I'M talking about!

Nice, Ely.

Almost everybody who uses the Esc key frequently knows this annoyance: accidentally launching Help when you meant to hit Esc.

The reason it's way more frustrating than typical mis-types is because Help takes forever to load, resizes the app's window on your desktop, and changes your app-window focus to the Help frame.

This always sucks for me and drives me nuts since I use the Esc key often. The degree of frustration often depends on the keyboard layout: it almost never happens on my spacious "Natural" wireless keyboard, but it happens all the time on my laptop where the keys are closer together.

I recently got a great new Lenovo ThinkPad X60 ultra-portable laptop for work (and I love it!!), but the keyboard arrangement is especially inconvenient when it comes to Esc and F1. Typically Esc is above the ~/` key and to the left of F1. On my full-size Natural keyboard there's actually about 2cm of space between Esc and F1.

But on the X60 keyboard (and maybe on all ThinkPad keyboards?) Esc is above the F1 key and the F1 key is exactly where my pinky finger's used to going for Esc. In this graphic the key in the upper-left is Esc, below it is F1, below that is the ~/` key:

Right before jumping out the window, I remembered that my friend Mike from my EQuill start-up days fixed this problem for me a long time ago by adding a mysterious line to my AUTOEXEC.BAT start-up file that neutered the F1 key entirely. So I pinged Mike and he did me one better: he pointed me at SharpKeys. IT IS AWESOME!

With SharpKeys you can disable or re-map any key on your keyboard. You can do it by selecting keys from a list or just by tapping them, which is a great feature. Since I never use F1 I mapped it to Esc. So now no matter which key I wack, I get the Esc behavior that I wanted.

Thank you Mike and thank you SharpKeys!

I won't go into just how embarassing it is to be the new guy in the office, in charge of tech no less, and to be unable to stop my laptop from beeping loudly everytime new email arrives.

Despite the fact that my WinXP sound scheme is set to No Sounds!

I'm sure I've found this setting in the past, but because I only need to do this sort of configuration tweak every 18 months or so I always forget where it is.

Luckily I was saved by this Joel on Software post with instructions for turning off the beep. It's already the #1 Google result for the query outlook beep disable so apparently this post has already helped more than a few people!

Thanks, Joel on Software.  :)

The Wikipedia article in the New Yorker that I linked a few weeks back has nothing on this article from The Onion. It's outrageously funny!

Found via Kevin Schofield's blog.

I saw this in a CNET News article today:

"The viral video space is so hot right now; it's like Hansel from the movie 'Zoolander,'" said Aram Sinnreich, managing partner of RadarResearch, referring to the 201 [sic] comedy about competition in the modeling business. "I wouldn't be surprised to see (online video market leader) YouTube receive a bid of $1 billion. Whether the company is worth it is another question."

I want to start tracking other statements from this analyst to see if he consistently references characters from great movies!